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User acquisition is more than just getting customers through the door—it’s about understanding their deeper needs and ensuring long-term value. Hannah Parvaz shares the essential strategies they implement at Aperture, from defining a North Star metric to calculating acquisition costs and experimenting with messaging.
Mastering User Acquisition Strategies Summary
Key Takeaways
- Talk to Your Customers: Understanding the psychological reasons behind why your customers use your product can unlock new opportunities for acquisition.
- Start Small with Big Ideas: Experimentation should begin with simple, testable ideas that can scale as you gather more data.
- Identify Your North Star Metric: Focus on a key metric that aligns both customer satisfaction and business goals to guide your growth strategy.
- Don’t Spread Yourself Thin: Concentrate on marketing channels that suit your business and internal capabilities, rather than trying to do everything at once.
- Refine Customer Acquisition Costs: Start with simple lifetime value and acquisition cost calculations, then refine them over time for more accuracy.
How to Master User Acquisition and Lead Generation: A Strategic Approach
When it comes to growing your business, user acquisition and lead generation are two of the most critical components. But the path to mastering these strategies isn’t always straightforward. Too often, businesses rely on a scattergun approach—trying a bit of everything without really knowing what works. If that sounds familiar, don’t worry. Today, we’ll dive into some proven strategies that will help you sharpen your focus and optimize your efforts in acquiring new users and generating leads.
1. Start with Customer Understanding
At the heart of successful user acquisition is a deep understanding of your customers. It’s surprising how often businesses skip this step, diving straight into tactics without truly knowing who they’re targeting. The key to unlocking effective acquisition is understanding the psychological reasons behind why your customers use your product or service. What problem are they trying to solve? What motivates them? By talking directly to your customers, you’ll gather insights that can inform your entire acquisition strategy—from the channels you choose to the messaging you craft.
2. Leverage the ‘Jobs to Be Done’ Framework
One powerful way to dig into customer motivation is by using the ‘Jobs to Be Done’ framework. This approach goes beyond just the functional aspects of your product. It asks, “What job is your customer hiring your product to do?” For instance, a nightlife app might initially seem like it’s just for finding free drinks at bars. But dig deeper, and you might find that users are really looking for a way to socialize, impress, or connect. Understanding these underlying motivations allows you to tailor your user acquisition strategies to better meet the real needs of your audience.
3. Identify and Focus on Your North Star Metric
Not all metrics are created equal. In user acquisition and lead generation, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of data. That’s why it’s crucial to identify your North Star metric—a single, guiding measurement that aligns customer success with business goals. This might be daily active users for a social app, or repeat purchases for an e-commerce site. The key is to find a metric that reflects both customer satisfaction and business success, then orient all your strategies around improving that number.
4. Experimentation: Big Ideas, Small Tests
When it comes to growing your user base or generating leads, experimentation is your best friend. However, it’s important to approach experimentation strategically. Start with big ideas but test them through small, manageable experiments. This allows you to gather data and insights without committing significant resources to unproven concepts. For example, if you’re testing new messaging for a paid ad campaign, begin with a few variations targeting small segments of your audience. Once you identify what works, you can scale those efforts.
5. Choose the Right Channels
Choosing the right channels for user acquisition and lead generation is critical. Not every channel will be a good fit for every business. For instance, paid ads might work well for a consumer product with a short purchase decision cycle but may not be the best for a high-ticket B2B service with a long sales funnel. Instead of spreading yourself thin across too many channels, focus on the ones that align with your business type and where you have internal expertise. If you’re a content-driven business, lean into SEO and content marketing. If you have the budget and the need for quick results, explore paid advertising.
6. Understand Customer Acquisition Costs
Many businesses overlook the importance of understanding their customer acquisition costs (CAC). Without this knowledge, you risk spending more to acquire a customer than they are worth to your business. Start with simple calculations based on average customer lifetime value (LTV) and refine these as you gather more data. Over time, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions about where to allocate your resources for the best return on investment.
7. Walk Before You Run
In user acquisition and lead generation, it’s tempting to want immediate results. But remember: success often comes from a series of small, incremental gains. Start with the basics—talk to your customers, choose the right channels, identify your North Star metric, and experiment with small tests. As you gather data and learn what works, you can refine and scale your strategies for greater impact.
Conclusion
Mastering user acquisition and lead generation is no small feat, but with the right approach, it’s entirely achievable. Start by understanding your customers, then build your strategies around that knowledge. Choose the right metrics, channels, and experiments to guide your efforts. And remember, in digital marketing, slow and steady often wins the race. By focusing on these key areas, you’ll not only attract more users but also ensure they’re the right users for your business, setting the stage for sustainable growth.
Mastering User Acquisition Strategies Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is the founder of Aputure, a multi award-winning marketer, coach, and mentor. She has been named “App Marketer of the Year” and has spoken internationally on the future of app growth, privacy, and leveraging data analytics.
Having worked with over 250 companies, she’s passionate about supporting and lifting others within the industry, coaching for Systm, S Y S T M, gaining a five-star rating on growth mentor, and having been a Google launchpad mentor. Today, we’re going to be talking about user acquisition strategies with Hannah Parvaz. Hannah, welcome to the podcast.
Hannah: Hello, Rich. Thank you so much for having me. What a beautiful intro that was. You’re making me blush. It’s really nice to be here.
Rich: It’s really just your hard work that got you here. So all I’m doing is just reporting. That’s all I’m doing here is reporting.
I’m glad to have you here. I’m excited to talk about this topic. And so let’s just start with the basics Hannah, user acquisition. We’re looking to attract and acquire new users or members or customers, building blocks of any business. What, in your opinion, are some of the things that are keeping businesses from attracting enough of the right type of users?
Hannah: Ooh, right in there. Okay. We can start here. Firstly, I would say that the number one thing that I have noticed when companies come and talk to me or when I’m working with any kind of business really, is this lack of knowledge of your customer. Over and over again, I have these mentoring sessions and consulting sessions. And what I hear is they’ve oftentimes, founders or growth people or marketers, haven’t literally spoken to any actual customers.
I started working with this very large company recently and I asked them, “When was the last time you spoke to any customers?” And they said, “The last time? We never have.” And this is really a huge issue. So whenever we’re thinking about user acquisition or customer acquisition, the very first thing that we usually do is start with talking to customers who’s already buying your product, who was already engaging with you as a brand. Talking to those people and understanding from a kind of psychological perspective, what do they want? What are they using your product for? What is your solution for in their life?
There’s this theory you’re probably familiar with, and probably everyone listening is familiar with, it’s called ‘jobs to be done’. And this is a theory which basically talks about what is this person actually using your product for? And as a part of this, a lot of the time people think of only these functional jobs to be done. The actual thing it’s for that it’s very objectively for, they don’t really drill down. So when we’re thinking about user acquisition, customer acquisition, what we want to do is start drilling down. What are the actual reasons that someone is using a product for, and then we want to help mirror their language throughout our product, throughout our acquisition strategy.
And the second part of this is defining really what is success and then working towards that. So we usually have defined in advance, obviously our business North Star metric. So if you are if you are working towards a North Star metric, everyone in your business should be aligned around that. And we should be able to identify some key levers, really, some key drivers which drive up to that.
So when we’re pairing these two things together, we’ve got now a really rich understanding of our customers through these psychology conversations, and then we’re identifying how we’re measuring success really. We should be able to create quite a clear roadmap of what someone is trying to achieve so that we can use this in our messaging and our campaigns. Whether that’s through kind of organic social media or paid media, this will help define and determine all of this, as well as our product roadmap if we’re working on a product in that way.
Rich: All right. Speaking of the jobs to be done theory and just focusing on that for a second, how would you suggest that we better leverage this to understand what motivates our customers that might then influence what we do next? And if you have an example from a client you worked with, I’d love to hear that too.
Hannah: Absolutely. So when I first started learning about jobs to be done, I was working at this product, which was a nightlife bar marketing product. And what you’d do is you’d go to the app store, you download an app, and inside the app you would literally see bars. You’d be able to discover bars that were all curated, and there would be free drinks at the bars. So you’d go to the bar, show them your phone, they’d tap your phone screen and then they’d make you a cocktail. Simple as that.
So whenever I started learning about jobs to be done theory, really what I thought it was, the job to be done of people using that product was to go to a bar and get a free drink. But as I peeled back the layers, I started to understand, no, the job isn’t to go get a free drink. The job is to have conversations, or to build better connections, or to impress your boss, or celebrate my family member. There’s lots of these different things that someone is using this product to do.
And within that product specifically, we found out the way in which the product worked was that, as a bar, you could say my free drinks are only available Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 6 till 8 PM. But we started to see that there was a lot of people using the product on Friday night and Saturday night when there was no drinks available. And we started talking to our customers. Okay, why do you keep opening the app on a Friday when there’s no drinks available? That’s not what the product’s for. And what they started to then tell us was, “I’m actually using it to figure out a bar to go to. I’m not trying to find this free drink. I’m just trying to discover a place to go. I’m trying to see what’s near me.”
And so this actually then unlocked something for us. It went even further. We actually rebuilt the product around this and rebranded the product. And the first page now when you launch that is a map of what’s closest to you. Because that was a huge use case and then that meant that we were able to then bring on bars and curate places to go that weren’t giving away a free drink, but we’re fulfilling that other users need.
So that’s the kind of way that can help us with customer acquisition. And then that is a really good product to actually talk about in this way, because it had a really brilliant growth loop. If I’m going to a bar with you, Rich, and you see me getting my phone out and getting a free drink, you probably want a free drink too, right?
Rich: Probably, yes. Yeah.
Hannah: You’re not going to be like, nah, not for me. So what we did then was we built in a referral system. So if I referred you, we both got an extra free drink that night. And so we had this inherent growth loop, which really lent into all of that, it’s about experiencing this with people.
It wasn’t very common that people were going and using this product on their own. I just want to go get a free drink on my own. It was a socialization tool. And so we built that in as a parable of conversations.
Rich: And again, that all comes back to actually talking to your customers. Because you built the app, or somebody built the app, for a specific purpose. But the customer base is like, that’s not exactly how I’m using it, I’m actually using it this way. So always a good idea to check in with those customers and start to understand why they do the things that they do.
Now, with customer acquisition comes the idea of customer acquisition costs. And I’ve discovered over the past 27 years or so, that most businesses have absolutely no idea what it costs to attract a customer. They’re not tracking this. So when you’re working with clients, how do you determine what a business should be willing to spend to attract a new customer or user?
Hannah: It’s a really good question. And for every single business, that number will be different, that should be obvious. And the way in which we should be thinking about it is What is the lifetime value of our customer, and the way in which we’re calculating this, let’s say you’re a supplement brand and you’re on a subscription, okay, and your subscription costs, I’m just using really simple numbers here, but like your subscription costs $50 a month. So maybe you’re retained for six months and then you turn, we’ve got $50, $50, $50 that we’re getting from that one customer because they’re on a subscription. And so actually, even if we’re paying $299 and we’re getting $300 back, we’re making a profit here.
So what we want to do is look at, what is the lifetime value of our customers. And for different products, it will be different. You’ll be able to calculate that in a different way. If you’re like that supplement brand, you just want to add up every single month that someone is an active subscriber for other products. If you’re a pure e-comm where people are doing one-time purchases over and over again, what you’re going to do is look at what is the average kind of purchase value across everyone? What is the average number of times someone purchases?
And then you’ll be able to start determining that by channel from Meta ads, from Instagram and Facebook ads, someone will be spending average on average, this kind of amount over their lifetime. On Google, it will be this much, on TikTok is this much. And this will help us then determine, okay, on Meta, we’ve actually got an average lifetime value of $550, so we can actually acquire customers for a bit more than we can on TikTok, where we’ve got an average lifetime value of $100.
So this is how we’re usually going to calculate this. I work with some subscription apps, and most of the time with subscription apps, what they’re doing is pushing for annual recurring revenue instead, so they’re billing annually. Like whenever you open an app and you see this paywall and you’ve got monthly one price, annual one price, usually what kind of conversion that is, it’s about four months to one year, roughly. So after you’ve paid about four months, it’s actually cheaper usually to go for annual, so they position that in the way it was on purpose to make you go and lean towards annual because it’s cheaper for you. And it’s more beneficial for them because they get the revenue quicker, they get that working capital quicker so they can acquire more of you.
And then from there we would look at how many years is someone retained for. Maybe we have a 50% attrition year on year. We’ve got 100% of people, your 2 is 50% your 3 is 25%, so we’re looking at cohorts in that way, really.
Rich: It sounds like there’s some basic things that we can do to get some simple numbers, let’s just figure out on average what things are, and then you, as you become more sophisticated in this, you can start to, like you said, break it down by channel or even some other demographics, but walk before you run is some of the thing that I’m taking away from what you’re saying.
Hannah: Absolutely. Yeah. Always walk before your run, come up with a really big idea and test it in a simple way. And it should be like this across your business overall. And it should be like that with your data, don’t get bogged down in trying to calculate everything under the sun before you’ve even got the basics in there.
And this is a very common problem. People won’t let themselves even start sometimes because they want to have everything completed this kind of waterfall of everything, and what we find to be better is. Release often and release smaller. And that goes down to data as well.
Get your SDKs in there first, before you’ve done all of your event mapping. Check that’s working, check that’s firing with Google analytics or with Amplitude or with Mixpanel or whichever tools you’re using to track, Triple Whale. And then once you’re happy it’s in there, it’s firing, then map your events, map the things that you’re trying to track. So just do it all in a phased approach.
And similarly with your lifetime value, calculate overall first, and then start drilling into different channels or different cohorts or different ages. Because very quickly as you’ve got big data sets, you can get very granular with that data, too. So yeah, always start small. Get started really is the main point of it, start somewhere and optimize from there.
Rich: All right, nice segue into the next question. Because if we feel like we’re not attracting enough users, what are some of the first steps that we might take to right the ship? What do you do first when you’re working with a client, excluding the, ‘you actually should talk to your clients or customers’?
Hannah: Yeah, first if we are struggling with this acquisition side of things, I would be looking at what kind of business do I have. There’s really only a few different ways that you’re really going to be able to scale your business in a true kind of digital way. That might be paid ads, that might be SEO content and inbound, that might be sales. And part sales and partnerships, that could be influencers, that could be virality.
And so what we want to do first is look at which of these channels, which of these lanes is most relevant for us. Paid ads might not be the right answer for a really high ticket B2B business or for those full conversions, because there will be a long consideration period. There’ll be a long window. But paid ads will be really good for a drinks brand that’s e-comm only. Because someone will see that and there’ll be attracted by it, they’ll see someone posting about it online, and then they’ll make a quick decision. It’s not going to break the bank usually to buy that product.
So first, we look at the channels. And what we have to know is, we don’t get to choose our channels. Our channels choose us. We don’t get to decide that B2B sales works for us. It just either does or it doesn’t. So that’s part one.
Part two are, what skills do we have internally within our business that we can leverage within these channels? There might be two channels or three that might make a lot of sense for us, but actually I’m a content writer and I’ve never run paid ads in my life. So actually content and SEO would make more sense for us as a business right now if those are two options.
So one, which channels make sense for you? And two, which channels am I suited for right now? And then from there, we would just get started. We want to go all in on the channels. You’re never going to make something magically work from the beginning. You’re not going to just turn on Facebook ads and become a trillionaire. You need to keep testing, optimizing, and going all in. Water only boils at 100 degrees Celsius. I don’t know why it’s in Fahrenheit.
Rich: I was about to say, and for Americans in the audience, it would be…
Hannah: How does it work in Fahrenheit?
Rich: I think it’s 212. God, I don’t know.
Hannah: Not quite.
Rich: When it bubbles, that’s when I know it’s been boiling.
And actually, that leads me perfectly, it’s like you’ve read these questions before. How can we experiment, or how can we use experimentation to improve those user acquisition strategies, maybe especially as it comes to you at Reference Digital Advertising?
Hannah: Everything that we do really should be an experiment. And everything that we do should be directing towards our North Star metric and should be experimenting towards that, until we validate something and then we’re scaling. But we’re also scaling through experimentation.
And so something I said before was, have big ideas and start small. It’s the same with your experiments. You want to have really big ideas, big, huge things that you want to test. We want to start with these tiny validations, big ideas, small experiments.
So what we usually do is if we’ve identified paid ads, and at my company we do run paid ads for lot of different e-comm, mobile apps, different consumer products. We have the exact same process for every single company because this is a process that works.
So what we do is we start with customer psychology. We have to start somewhere, and the best place to start is really with an understanding of our – I’m repeating myself – but it’s the truth, you need to start with understanding your customers. From there, what we do then is we have a huge ideation session of all of our team and all of their team, and we get down as many ideas as possible. So I’m talking like a hundred, over a hundred ideas. And we want to get all of these ideas from all of these different stakeholders, all of these different mindsets. And then we start grouping them by themes and then we start testing.
So if I’m going to get started on paid ads, for example, that’s exactly what we do. We’ve identified now a bunch of themes. These could be jobs to be done, these could be categories of influencer trends. And we’ve started to group all of these into different themes. So now we write down a line of copy or a message for each different theme. And we start testing each of these themes to identify which creative direction should we go down?
So what I see again and again, if companies aren’t following this, or if people aren’t following this approach, is they do what we call ‘spraying and praying’. They’ll produce loads and loads of UGC user generated content and put it all live and then they’ll see, oh, one of them is working. But they don’t know why, they don’t know how long it’ll last for, they don’t know which audience it’s going to resonate with. And then they come to us and say, we’ve spent months with this company producing UGC and now it’s all saturated and there are no learnings.
So what we do instead is we start slightly slower. We get these learnings first, and then that allows us to scale for a longer time. We scale based on those learnings. We all want to identify several different pillars. So those pillars might be a creative container, a visual that might be really effective for this brand. A pillar might be a specific theme or job or a different or specific way of saying something.
So once we’ve started to identify some of these, we start grouping them together and then scaling them up. And then we don’t tend to see much saturation around these because we validated them so much on top of that. Just a quick stat is that on average for Meta ads, for example, if you’re running a creative experiment – you can Google this fact check me – but there’s a 5% success rate. Or for Meta ads experiments, which means basically your new experiment beats your control, what was running before for us, for one of our companies. Now we’ve had 12 successful experiments in a row.
Rich: Oh, wow.
Hannah: This is because we started slow. We got those learnings and now we can scale them. So every single thing we do now is just beating and beating and beating our control because we’re learning more and more. So yeah.
Rich: So I can imagine, I know that a lot of people want immediate results. And the idea was definitely pitched years ago that with Facebook ads or Google ads, you can start making money the minute you start running ads. How do you talk to your clients about this slower approach? And how do you manage their expectations about when they should start seeing the results that they’re expecting?
Hannah: This is something we get asked a lot, and for every company it is different in the amount of time it will take. For some companies, and we did work with a supplement brand, actually the supplement brand had been not profitable for the whole time it had existed, which was over three years. And we took over that account. They had 142 live campaigns in their account. I don’t know if you have any concept of how many that is, but that is absolutely wild. And we reduced that down to three. And within three months, we were profitable. That wasn’t the only thing we did. We didn’t just reduce down to three campaigns. We restructured everything. We created a new creative strategy, but within three months, that was a profitable business after three years and a lot of the time.
Companies come to us because that is what they had been doing. They had been creating 142 different campaigns, targeting all of these different people with a couple of different messages, and they’d seen it hadn’t been working. And so we have this structured approach, which we’ve proven again and again is very successful. So by now there isn’t as much convincing to do with it.
But what we do is we are very transparent about it. We take everyone through a deck we send them. We send them podcasts and collateral about it. We show them lots of examples. We show them how these creatives iterate to make sure that they have a really clear understanding of what’s about to happen as well. We explain that usually months one and two are testing months. This is messaging test one, messaging test two, we do design tests. Then, based on the messages that have been successful, we want to validate does this message still work with different designs? And then from there we go into UGC higher investment creatives. We go into landing page tests. We go into building specific flows also inside the product, whether that’s inside your mobile app or a landing page flow, which is on your website.
So we just talk them through all of this really. One of the key things is that you just want to remain transparent. Every single week we get together with our companies. We have a meeting, we have a live dashboard as well that we build for everyone so that everyone can keep track. They can see their performance in real time. We’re not trying to hide anything, because we know it works.
Rich: So you had mentioned a few times about this North Star metric, we might call it a key performance indicator. How do you determine what that North Star metric or KPI is? I’m sure it depends, but what does the process look like there?
Hannah: So your North Star metric is going to be a metric in your business that aligns everyone, and What this is not a metric, which is revenue or something like this. It’s something that has to represent your customer and your business interests.
And so when we’re talking about these and we’re in e-comm, it’s not just going to be something like number of sales. That would be a very important metric, but maybe how are we retaining customers? What about the number of sales from retained customers? You can always get lots of new sales from a million different people one time. How are we retaining those people? Similarly with just to go back to subscription apps, we’ve been speaking about those a little bit, something very common for a subscription app or even a subscription product would be including a cadence in there, how let’s say there’s a meditation app, your usage of your customer’s usage is really important in there. So are they using it? Are they meditating? So we would want something about the cadence, like weekly, we would want that they’re meditating, meditators, weekly meditators. But then we also want this revenue generating event in there to represent our business needs. So we would have weekly subscribing meditators, for example, weekly subscribed meditators. When we think about Meta, do you know their North Star metric?
Rich: Time spent on site, I would guess.
Hannah: Their North Star metric is daily active users.
Rich: Okay.
Hannah: So that’s a really good example of this cadence action person. So the way they monetize is through advertising revenue. So they have a subscription in there, because just you being active on those platforms is making them money. So they have daily active users, they’ve got over 3 billion, I think. Daily active users, which is absolutely insane. And it’s a crazy number to think about it.
When we think about Airbnb, their North Star metric is nights booked. It’s not bookings made, because you might make a one day booking and I might make a 40 day booking, and if it was just bookings, they would be evenly weighted. So their North Star metric is nights booked. And so this is representing me as a customer, I’m booking nights, I’m successful here. And it’s also representing what they want, which is nights booked. More revenue.
There’s another company called Bloom and Wild, which is a flower delivery company. They do these letterbox flowers. They’re so beautiful. They have incredible marketing as well. Not one of my companies. And they post you or someone would post you letterbox flowers. Their North Star metric is flowers delivered, flowers received. Because it’s not about the sales. It’s making sure that these flowers have actually been delivered and received by the customers. So this then covers this whole process of the delivery and making sure that is a part of the experience as well. Because a lot of the time, if companies are just saying, “revenue, new customers” a lot of this kind of experience is lost. You get too centered on conversion and not on retention. And this can be a big problem for growth overall.
Rich: That makes a lot of sense because very often we talk about how incentivizing certain actions can actually lead to really terrible outcomes. And the idea of the North Star metric is helpful in that it ties all the important ones together. And we talk about this internally all the time, is that sometimes if you look at one number, things seem great and they’re not, or vice versa. It’s, “Oh, look at all the sales we’ve got” Yeah, but you’re turning and burning. So that’s not necessarily good. So I love this idea of finding that North Star metric, it makes a lot of sense.
Hannah, great content, brilliant ideas here. If people want to learn more about you, if they want to learn more about Aperture, where can we send them online?
Hannah: You can visit the Aperture website, which is just aperture.london, or you can find me on LinkedIn. You can just search Hannah Parvez, H A N N A H P A R V A Z. But there’s only one of my name anyway, so you’ll find me quite easily. Or type in Hannah Aperture. But yeah, thanks for having me.
Rich: And we’ll have those links in the show notes as well. Hannah, an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.
Hannah: Thank you so much for having me, Rich. It was a pleasure.
Show Notes:
Hannah Parvaz and her team at Aperture share their expertise around helping businesses attract and acquire new customers, while also putting an emphasis on customer retention. Be sure to connect with her on LinkedIn.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.